Order in Chaos, New York The Richard Taittinger Gallery
19th Jul 2022
25 June–23 July 2022 · Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York
Order in Chaos brought together fifteen works exploring cultural memory, traditional craftsmanship and the unsettled experience of the pandemic. Presented at Richard Taittinger Gallery, the exhibition moved between densely populated paintings, carved surfaces and images that reveal another subject within their apparent disorder.
In his correspondence with the gallery, Tsai described the exhibition as an attempt to renew dialogue between East and West at a moment of increasing isolation. Its title also offered an invitation: each viewer could find a personal order within the abundance of the images.
The Skull as a World Within a World
In Quarantine Skull (2022), the skull becomes a container for the objects and routines of an unfamiliar daily life. Its crowded interior asks viewers to move between the overall silhouette and individual details. The red and blue pills in its mouth recall The Matrix, introducing a question about whether life should return to its previous patterns or take a different course.
Other skull works draw on cultural and historical memory. The gallery’s exhibition text discussed Summer Palace Skull (2022), in which architectural imagery and the Joker inhabit the same intricate composition. Across these works, Tsai’s enduring interest in life, death and renewal develops through increasingly layered pictorial narratives.
Guan Yu: An Encounter Between Heroes
In Guan Yu (2022), Superman and the Chinese warrior share a game while the scene recalls the story of Guan Yu receiving treatment to his poisoned arm. Familiar emblems of strength appear in a situation that also exposes vulnerability. The encounter combines Chinese historical storytelling with the graphic immediacy of Western comics.
Rather than allowing either figure to dominate the other, Tsai brings their different worlds into one pictorial space. Their meeting gives a human scale to the exhibition’s larger concern with conflict, coexistence and the possibility of dialogue. Humour makes the image approachable; its details complicate any simple division between hero and opponent.
A Landscape That Changes as We Look
A Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix (2022) extends this dialogue through optical illusion. Birds, flowers and landscape form an abundant surface, while larger figures emerge through the relationship between positive and negative space. The viewer alternates between discovering the hidden image and returning to its constituent parts.
A Rubik’s cube, marbles, a plaster figure, a Tang sancai horse and a railbus bring memories of childhood into this imagined landscape. Alongside references to the pandemic, these objects connect personal recollection with a city and world undergoing rapid change.
Craft and Moving Images
The exhibition also explored how inherited techniques could carry contemporary subjects. The lacquer work PCR Test brings a familiar pandemic ritual into a theatrical encounter with Superman, while the silk embroidery Venus explores a classical figure concealed within landscape. Material experimentation accompanies questions of everyday vulnerability and hidden imagery.
Augmented reality added another form of encounter. Four Horses and Tigers in Wonderland were accompanied by AR experiences developed with ZHEN., extending the works into motion through visitors’ phones. Across these different forms, the exhibition treated a changing medium as a way to discover new possibilities within the same artistic language.
All In: A Shared Table
In All In (2022), Superman and figures drawn from Chinese pictorial traditions gather around a poker table. Cards, chips and theatrical gestures turn the scene into an encounter between different characters and visual worlds. The title suggests both the wager on the table and the commitment of entering a game whose outcome remains uncertain.
Executed as lacquer carving on wood panel, the work gives the immediacy of comic imagery a richly worked physical surface. Its crowded composition brings the exhibition’s themes of chance, coexistence and the search for order into a single shared space.
All In, 2022 · Lacquer carving on wood panel · 220 × 165 cm
